Telecom Giant TeliaSonera Taps Spotify Founder for Help

There comes a point for some successful and disruptive entrepreneurs when the old guys on the block start calling you for help.

That day has come for Martin Lorentzon, the 43-year-old co-founder and chairman of music streaming service Spotify Ltd., who on Thursday was nominated as a new board member in telecom operator TeliaSonera AB, one of Sweden’s largest companies by market cap and a top-five telecom in Europe.

TeliaSonera has been rocked in recent weeks by a controversial investment in a telecom license in Uzbekistan, which is being probed by Swedish anti-corruption prosecutors. The committee in charge of nominating TeliaSonera’s new board members have called for a fresh start for the telecom operator, after the company’s CEO Lars Nyberg, along with a large number of board members, resigned over the controversy earlier this month, leaving the carrier virtually leaderless.

”The preparations of the Nomination Committee… have been more extensive than normally,” the committee said in a news release on Thursday, adding that is has concluded that TeliaSonera now “needs a new start in many respects.” It added that Spotify’s Mr. Lorentzon is one a collection of business minds that “possess competencies and experience that reflect future challenges of TeliaSonera.”

Observers may note that, in some respects, this is also a bit of a new direction for Spotfy’s chairman. After years of being a sort of garage-based whiz in Sweden, famous for tinkering with ideas, Mr. Lorentzon will now be sitting in a board room of a former telecom monopoly, in which the governments of Sweden and Finland still hold a 49% stake. His job will include being the judge of innovation rather than the innovator.

His fellow board members in TeliaSonera will include telecom industry legends such as Nokia Corp.’s former CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as well as Tapio Kuula, the chief of Finnish utility Fortum Oyj. The board composition represents a big change compared with that of Spotify, which consists of a number of suave venture capitalists and IT-rock star Sean Parker, the founder of file-sharing site Napster.

However, Mr. Lorentzon said getting this gig at TeliaSonera’s board is a bit “like coming home.” His first employment back in 1995 was actually as a trainee at TeliaSonera, and through the carrier, he later got a job working as a Telia representative at AltaVista in San Francisco.

“I know telecom and the Internet on the back of my hand,” he wrote in an email to the WSJ. “Old monopolies are also prone to change.”

In Sweden, TeliaSonera and Spotify have been in close cooperation over the past years. In 2009 the two companies signed an exclusive agreement, whereby TeliaSonera offers its phone and internet subscribers subsidized access to the popular music service.